


Aftermath

by Frontierland_Productions, juliasets



Series: Season 16: The Dark Web [3]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angst, Canon Universe, Canon-Typical Violence, Case Fic, Gen, Post-Season/Series 15
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-13
Updated: 2021-03-13
Packaged: 2021-03-21 15:01:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,757
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30023559
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Frontierland_Productions/pseuds/Frontierland_Productions, https://archiveofourown.org/users/juliasets/pseuds/juliasets
Summary: Sam and Dean investigate a support group for victims of the supernatural when they realize that there have been mysterious attacks in the area. They run into a familiar face, but their investigation might attract dangerous attention.(Episode 2 of Frontierland's SPN Season 16 fanworks collaboration!)
Relationships: Dean Winchester & Sam Winchester
Series: Season 16: The Dark Web [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2187309
Comments: 13
Kudos: 27
Collections: SPN Season 16 by Frontierland Productions





	Aftermath

**Author's Note:**

  * For [kirathehyrulian](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kirathehyrulian/gifts).



> [Art Masterpost by kirathehyrulian](https://archiveofourown.org/works/30001887)  
> [Season Playlist on Spotify](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/0hnxBfHbYLA7VAJUSLABAV?si=3765cf93fdaa43e7)  
> 
> 
>   
> So many thanks to all the other creators at Frontierland who helped me develop this story. Special thanks to my beta, road_rhythm, and everyone else who gave their input.
> 
> At Frontierland, we love this show and decided to continue Sam and Dean’s story where 15.19 left off. New episodes will drop every second weekend from a collection of different writers and artists so follow the [Frontierland Productions tumblr](https://frontierlandproductions.tumblr.com/) for notifications on the latest or more information about the project, and check out our [AO3 collection](https://archiveofourown.org/collections/Frontierland_SPN_Season_16).

_THEN: With Chuck powerless and Jack totally hands off, Sam and Dean have found themselves free, but discovered they are the topic of a true crime podcast called Big Black Car. When they investigate a werewolf with Jody in Sioux Falls, they have a run-in with the podcaster. Oh, and not only are they on the radar of humans, the werewolf hinted that there might be larger forces at play. In his pocket they found a business card for a support group for victims of the supernatural, called Aftermath._

  
  


* * *

  


The First United Methodist Church in Vincennes, Indiana is brick and stately, with soaring stained glass windows and a bell tower. It sits happily surrounded by houses that are historic rather than outdated, from an era when trade along the Wabash made this city a bustling destination.

The basement of First United is a classic of the church basement genre. Beige-flecked linoleum and white walls are illuminated by fluorescent bulbs set into a water-stained drop ceiling. There’s a lopsided circle of metal folding chairs arranged in the center of the room, while tables laden with coffee and donuts have been pushed up against the walls.

Those gathered are standing alone along the perimeter, a few clumping up to exchange pleasantries. The clock on the wall ticks over a few minutes past the top of the hour and a man checks his watch before stepping into the wide empty space in the center of the room. He’s tall and wiry, with a nervous energy that’s more endearing than off-putting. “Do we want to take our seats?” It’s a question best read as a command, Midwestern politeness bordering on passive-aggression.

The people sort themselves into the metal chairs, leaving a courteous gap where they can. They’re a small crowd, an even dozen.

The man who called them to order smiles at the assembled. “My name’s Allen. I see we have some new faces. Maybe you want to start, and then we can do a round of introductions.” He nods at the two new faces across the circle from him.

One of the new people smiles. “Hi, I’m Dean.”

* * *

_Forty-Eight Hours Earlier – Lebanon, KS_

Dean wakes up late and a little hungover. A downside of getting old is that even a night of casual drinking—or what passes for casual for a Winchester—is not without its discomfort. But the throbbing behind his eyes is manageable, especially after coffee, some breakfast, and maybe a hair of the dog.

The cut on his arm is healing nicely from the vamp encounter a few weeks back. With no pressing hunt since the werewolf in Sioux Falls they’ve been down in the bunker for days. The downtime has been nice enough, Dean’s caught up on some television, fiddled with the car a little. He plays fetch with Miracle in the halls. It’s nice, low-pressure. A chance to unwind.

He’s getting antsy.

Sam doesn’t show for breakfast, so Dean goes to find him. Miracle, who’d appeared when he smelled the bacon cooking, tags along at his heels.

Sam’s holed up in the archives, staring intently at his laptop. The several half-empty mugs of coffee suggest a late night, or a few of them. What’s strange is the table is free from any other research materials—no stacks of books, no open files, no curse boxes.

Dean wasn’t exactly sneaking, but when he sets a plate of scrambled eggs and toast down next to him, Sam starts.

“Brain food, Sammy.”

Sam shoots him a quick smile in thanks. He straightens in his seat, pushing away from the table and stretching out his back. He’s probably been hunched over his screen for hours. Miracle curls up in the dog bed in the corner, though he keeps a careful eye on Sam’s food for any dropped scraps.

Dean waits until Sam’s a couple bites in before asking. “What you working on?”

Sam nods and swallows his eggs. “I’ve been looking into that support group, Aftermath.”

“Yeah, the one with the business cards, right? Somehow connected to our werewolf friend.”

“And Emily, the podcast host, she recommended it as well.”

“So what’d you find?”

“It’s mostly online—Facebook groups and stuff that grew out of an old message board. They’ve got a website, too. Most of the people either lost someone under strange circumstances or have had some sort of encounter with the paranormal.”

“So why haven’t we heard of it before?”

“Well, it’s not like we do a lot of follow-up on cases, Dean.”

Sam’s got a point, there. Dean sometimes thinks about some of the people they’ve saved—he knows that Sam does the same. They don’t usually stick around for more than making sure everyone is in one piece, and often not even that. Dean assumes they get back to their lives.

Except, as they recently learned about Magda, maybe they don’t.

He also knows it’ll never be that easy. A lot of those people lost loved ones or faced down monsters, the kinds of things that give normal people nightmares. Probably an online support group is a better coping mechanism than drinking themselves to sleep.

Hypothetically.

“Okay,” Dean concedes. “But all that doesn’t explain…” Dean gestures to the graveyard of empty coffee cups. “Facebook can’t be that addicting.”

“Some of them have started meeting in person. I looked back through the posts and a handful of people had a few meetups near Chicago. A year or so back, the meetings moved down to southern Indiana, Vincennes. Now they’re regular, monthly. A few of the people who were posting mentioned moving there to attend.”

“ _Moving_ there? That’s a little weird.”

Sam nods. “What’s really weird is that some people from the area seem to have joined. More than a few.”

“Local?” Because that doesn’t seem right. Dean recognizes the name, he’s driven through it a few times on state highways when trying to avoid I-64 or I-69. There’s not much in that area of the state—farmland and churches. No reason for it to have a booming werewolf victim economy.

Sam continues. “Anyway, I ran the location through Charlie’s updated pattern recognition software. It scrapes information from social media, local news, whatever it can find and maps it out. The data is messy as hell, so I had to clean it up a bit, but….” Sam turns his laptop around.

The map on his screen shows a slice of the area, the Illinois-Indiana border running down the middle, a squiggly line following the Wabash River. Terre Haute sits at the top edge of the screen, and Evansville to the south. Superimposed on the map are pins from Charlie’s program, sparsely scattered throughout. There are a few small clusters, probably multiple news articles or tweets or whatever about a single incident. There are a decent number of pins to the southeast, in Louisville, as might be expected for a city that size.

And then there’s an area in the center of the map that looks like Sam’s taken it down to the shooting range. The pins blanket Vincennes and spread out through neighboring one-horse towns. 

“Well, that’s something,” Dean says, pulling the laptop toward himself. He zooms in on the area and even more little pins reveal themselves. “That werewolf did say they were ginning up victims. How is no one noticing the body count?”

“That’s the thing—there isn’t one. Or, not much of one.”

“All this and no deaths?”

Sam pulls the laptop back and switches tabs to an obituary. “Two deaths, from what I can tell. An old woman walking at night, that one was written off as some kind of animal attack.”

“Yeah, all those fearsome cornfield wolves.”

“And then we have a more recent death. Young guy, local, throat ripped open in his own house. A robbery gone wrong, according to the reports.”

Dean snorts, he can’t help it. Robbery, sure. The lengths people will go to in order to try and explain away the dark and spooky amazes and astounds him. “Lemme guess, they think whoever did it was on drugs.”

“Nailed it in one. Oh, and I almost forgot…” Sam clicks around a bit and brings the map up. It’s the same view of the Midwest, but absent the central cluster of pins. “This is what a year’s worth of data looked like before this group met there.”

“So not a coincidence.”

“Definitely not.”

“So what’s your plan?”

“I messaged the group, they said I could stop in on a meeting. I figure we make up a story, go in, see if anything strikes for us as weird.”

It’s a decent enough start, even if Dean doesn’t really like the sound of it. Groups like this might help some people, but they’ve never been Dean’s style. He’s been through enough shit in his life, but he has no interest in wallowing in it.

But they’re not likely to find a better in. Dean grabs Sam’s empty plate. “Alright, let’s hit the road.”

* * *

_Now_

“Hi, I’m Dean.”

He tones down the smile he gives the crowd, but only because he’s meant to be traumatized. It’s fine, he can work with it. Some girls love a fixer-upper.

“This is my brother, Sam. We, uh... I don’t know how much you want to hear.”

The ringleader speaks up. Sam had dug up a little information on the guy, Allen Jones. He wasn’t a local, but had been living here for about two years. Before that he was in Seattle, doing some kind of tech work. He’d lost his brother on a camping trip, almost certainly a wendigo from the bits of podcast interview Sam played him. Emily, the host of the podcast, interviewed him here in bumfuck Indiana and sat in on a few meetings. Something about Aftermath, about Allen, must have affected her because she’d taken a small stack of business cards to hand out to people she interviewed.

Dean doesn’t really see the appeal. Allen looks like a nerd, tall and skinny with large Harry Potter-style round glasses. He’s got the therapy, we’re-just-talking-here patter down cold, though, voice soft as he responds. “You can share as much or as little as you want. And a reminder about the rules to everyone: things said here might sound strange, might sound like they can’t be true. You can think that, if you want, but we don’t allow for second-guessing of anyone’s stories. We’ve all heard that from too many people.”

Dean bites back the part of him that wants to test that rule out. He and Sam have some stories that are pretty hard to believe. Should he tell them about Hell? About defeating Chuck? About killing Hitler?

He sticks to the story.

“Well, me and my brother were camping with some friends, a year or so back. Woke up in the middle of the night to this… sound. We were kind of freaked out, wondering if it was some kind of animal. I was getting ready to go out to look when our friends, in the other tent, just started screaming. We heard their tent rip and… whatever it was… Sam and I just took off running.”

Their story was something they’d cobbled together based on some wendigo hunts. It’s a lure, hoping that it’ll spark Allen’s interest, give them an in to talk to him. Using a vampire or werewolf cover story might have been simpler, but they were worried that there might be a mole—some monster posing as a human in the group. It was unlikely, but better to avoid it anyway.

Makes for a more interesting campfire story, too.

A woman in her mid-20s asks, “Did you see what it was?” She’s got long blonde hair hanging over her shoulders in waves. She’s pretty, dressed up enough that she wouldn’t look out of place at a bar, but not too much to stick out.

“I did,” Sam jumps in. “A little. Tall, walked on two legs. Not a bear, though. That’s what the rangers tried to say it was—a bear attack. They found the tent, after.”

The group is sympathetic. Dean’s used to sympathy, he has to play it up when he’s interviewing victims, but it’s different. As FBI they stick to the distant, non-specific pity you get from strangers. The people in this room, though, all have first-hand experience with tragedy.

“That’s horrible.”

“I’m so sorry.”

“Did you ever find out what it was?”

Sam shakes his head.

“It’s always the same story, when it happens in the woods,” says one woman, sitting across the circle from them. She’s petite, thin-boned wrists poking out from the sleeves of a black sweater. Her dark brown hair is pulled into a low ponytail. Her round face is pale, devoid of any makeup, and makes her look younger than she probably is, but her eyes on them are sharp.

Their story was a lure for Allen, but it looks like they got a bite here, instead.

She looks familiar, but for whatever reason Dean can’t place her.

“People go missing in national parks all the time,” she continues. “The Park Service doesn’t keep track of missing persons, do you know that? They don’t want to know. Because there are things out there that they don’t want to talk about. Things that we’re not told about.”

It’s obvious from the way people shift and glance between themselves that they’ve heard this spiel before from her. It’s the kind of looks people exchange when the crazy aunt starts talking politics at the family reunion.

Allen breaks in. “I don’t want us to get derailed.”

“Did something like that happen to you?” Sam asks, all naïve curiosity and puppy-dog eyes. Dean barely suppresses his smirk.

She gives them a long, searching look. “Yeah. It was me and my husband. We decided to do our honeymoon touring national parks. We started in Yellowstone, made our way up through Montana, then Idaho. We were headed west to Yosemite. Stopped for a quick overnight hike in Wallowa-Whitman. The area was called Hells Canyon. Probably a sign, right?”

The story sets off something in Dean’s brain and suddenly he realizes where he knows her from. Five years ago she was blonde.

“We had bear spray. We knew how to handle ourselves. But how do you prepare for an attack from something as smart as a human and as vicious as an animal? How do you prepare for your husband turning into one of them?”

“Werewolves,” Dean translates, because he remembers. Of course he remembers one of the worst hunts they’ve ever been on. Of course he remembers thinking Sam was dead, leaving him in that ranger station. Sam would be the first person to tell him it was the right call, has told Dean exactly that.

It’s fine, they don’t always agree.

She must recognize them, too. Hard not to remember the face of the man who saved you and your husband—or the man your husband almost killed. 

Then she knows their story is bullshit, or at least not the whole truth.

Dean spares a quick look at Sam, can tell he’s clocked her too. This could go sideways easily, if she decides to out them. Losing their credibility would be more of an annoyance than a danger on this hunt, but he’d still like to avoid the possibility.

He decides to go on the offensive. “Are you going to warn them?”

She glares at him, mulishly.

“Have you tried?” Dean asks. She doesn’t answer. “I bet you have, at least a little. And anyone you told, anyone outside this group, thought you were nuts.”

“That’s why we’re here, right?” Sam says, attempting to diffuse the tension that’s suddenly sprung up.

“That’s exactly right,” Allen says.

“Try telling people that your house is haunted,” adds one man. He’s older, probably pushing 60. “My family wanted to have me committed.”

“It’s worse when you find someone who believes you,” says another woman. “I find someone who believes me about the vampires and they’re suddenly trying to tell me about lizard-people.”

The conversation moves on. Several other people tell their stories. It’s a mélange of paranormal activity, a few poltergeists and hauntings to what sounds like a Rawhead. There are several other vampire attacks.

They finish out the hour like that. It’s not exactly pleasant, listening to people recount their deepest trauma. But it’s something different to see them do it among people who understand a little of what they’re going through. Sure, there’s a similar solidarity among hunters, but hunters aren’t known for their emotional capacity.

Michelle doesn’t take her eyes off of them for the rest of the meeting. Dean’s aware of the weight of her gaze, but they can’t address it here, not when they’re half-undercover.

When the hour is up people stand up and mingle a little. Allen stays, talking to a small gaggle of people, unfortunately including most of the young women. For all his Zuckerberg-esque manic nerd appearance, he seems to be holding court ably. Dean pours and chugs a lukewarm cup of coffee and grabs a donut for the road as he studies the room. He gives Sam the ‘wanna head out?’ head tilt and Sam nods in reply.

When they reach the Impala, parked in the far corner of the lot, Michelle of the doomed werewolf hunt is standing next to it.

“Michelle, right?” Dean asks. 

Her arms are crossed in front of her as she stares them down. “What are you doing here?”

“Listen, it’s almost lunch, right? Sam and I just got into town. How about you show us a good place to get some food and we’ll explain.”

-

Maisie’s is a nice little family restaurant. Someone clearly watched a little too much HGTV and tried to update the outdated fixtures without having the budget to renovate the whole place. Wooden tables and chairs sit on worn blue-gray carpeting. They’ve repainted the wainscoting and trim white and the walls a nice, safe gray. There are a few artfully distressed pieces of word art on the walls that they probably picked up from a big box store. It’s not like the diners that Dean normally frequents, but Michelle says they have a pretty good brunch. She gets a mimosa, but it’s not like Dean can judge. He orders a beer for himself and gives Sam’s assessing look an innocent shrug.

They explain a little of why they’re there while waiting for their food, that they’re in the area investigating an uptick of suspicious activity. When Sam talks about people in the area being attacked, Dean watches Michelle’s face closely. She’s quiet as she considers what they’re saying, but Dean doesn’t see anything that suggests she knew about it.

“How did you get involved with the group?” Sam asks. “Are you from around here?”

Michelle looks down at where she’s fiddling with the paper loop wrapped around her napkin and utensils.

“No, I’m not. Corbin and I were living in Denver before our honeymoon. After I came back, I couldn’t stay there. It was too hard. I found the group online and it helped, you know? Having someone to talk to about this. I tried talking to my friends, but they didn’t get it. I told my best friend what actually happened.” Michelle snorts, a sharp, bitter sound. “We don’t talk anymore.”

“So you moved here?”

“There was a meet-up a few years back, some of us got together in person. It was nice. I made a few friends. Then, when Allen was talking about having a regular meeting, I just decided to go for it. Packed up and moved. I actually live a few towns over, closer to the city.”

“You haven’t noticed anything unusual?” Sam asks.

They’re interrupted by the waitress returning with their food. Dean digs into his biscuits and gravy with relish. Not the best he’s had—they’re not far enough south for that—but passable.

Once they’ve started their meal, Sam—egg white omelet with veggies, an absolute waste of a meal—asks again if Michelle has noticed anything unusual.

She thinks about it as she chews. “We started with a smaller group. Not everyone shows up every week, a lot of people drive from far away or fly in just once. But a lot of the new people are local. I just figured it was because it was easier for them? But now I’m not so sure.”

“Can you give me an idea of who in the group is newer?”

“I think so. At least some of them. You guys should talk to Allen, he’d definitely know.”

She proceeds to tell them what she knows of the people they met today at the meeting and the few regulars who hadn’t been present. She keeps it to first names and information about whatever encounter with the supernatural they’ve told the group about. At some point about halfway through Dean catches Sam’s eye and can tell that Sam’s picked up on the same thing.

When breakfast is over they get Michelle’s contact information and promise to keep her in the loop, before heading out to the car.

“I thought that group seemed weird.” Dean says.

He doesn’t have to look over to know Sam’s rolling his eyes. “Only because you were busy checking them out.”

Dean shakes his head. “You didn’t think it was weird that a support group had so many sorority girls?”

Sam’s busy scribbling some notes. “And most of them are the new recruits.”

“All sound like vamp attacks, too.”

“So, what are we thinking? Picky vampire nest? Only attacks young women?”

Dean shrugs as he turns them onto the highway back to their motel. “They have preferences, sometimes.”

“Yeah, in the city,” Sam points out. “Where there’s opportunity. And you’d expect more deaths, more disappearances. Vamps don’t usually just… let their prey go.”

“So now we just gotta find the nest. Any patterns in where the attacks happened?”

“Other than targeting women in their twenties in a four county radius… not really.”

“And there’s no shortage of abandoned buildings,” Dean points out as they drive past the crumbling frame of a barn.

“We should probably do as Michelle suggested, talk to Allen.”

“Great.” It’s the right move, but that doesn’t make Dean any more excited to play nice with some touchy-feely nerd.

“I’ve got an idea, but you’re probably not going to like it.”

* * *

“So, you’re hunters?” Allen asks. 

“Yeah,” Dean says, because this was Sam’s bright idea: come clean.

Sam’s reasoning was that Allen is halfway there, by virtue of already knowing about various things that go bump in the night. Dean suggested they use their go-to FBI disguise, but Sam rightly pointed out that the members of Aftermath have been mostly failed by law enforcement before now. They also didn’t swear Michelle to secrecy, so their cover could go tits up at any point, which would set them back a lot more than just coming clean.

Doesn’t mean Dean has to like it.

At least it got them in the door when they showed up on Allen’s doorstep this afternoon. Allen lives in town, in a house that was probably built over a century ago but has been so remodeled you’d never be able to tell. It looks like something you’d find in any sprawling, soulless suburb. Allen is sitting in a wide, gray chair in his modern, gray living room. Sam and Dean sit across from him on his wide, gray couch. He’d offered them beers and Dean took him up on it. It’s some local microbrew, but it’s decent. Allen is drinking from an unlabeled bottle—he’s into home-brewing.

“So that story you told at group?”

“Not our story,” Sam admits. “But we’ve worked on hunts like it. It was a wendigo.”

“A wendigo?”

“They’re rare,” Dean says. “They used to be humans, but they turned to cannibalism to survive. Turns them into monsters.”

“That’s real?” Allen looks between them with wide eyes.

“Yes. I heard your interview with Emily Ramirez, we think that might be what happened to you and your brother,” Sam says, slipping into his soft talking-to-the-victims voice. He shoots Dean a ‘don’t scare the civilians’ look.

Dean gets his point, but something about Allen rubs him the wrong way. He couldn’t point to any one thing, though the overall yuppie-ness of his house is definitely part of it. It’s strange, meeting someone who knows about what’s out there in the dark, but doesn’t want to do anything other than talk about it. Maybe that’s hypocritical—most of the victims they’ve met don’t take up hunting as a side gig.

But he’s always imagined them going back to their normal lives. Trying their best to forget what they know, and continuing on with their lives. These people haven’t forgotten, they haven’t moved on. And Dean knows the hunting life isn’t for everyone, he knows that. Allen doesn’t really seem like the type who’d last long in their life—he drives a Tesla, for fuck’s sake. But what good is dwelling on it, when you can’t do anything about it?

Allen fiddles with the neck of his bottle. “I’ve heard of hunters, of course. Never met any, though.”

Dean thinks that’s unlikely, but keeps it to himself. You can’t surround yourself with this shit and not attract a few flies.

“What are you doing here?” Allen asks. “Not that you’re not welcome at group, of course you are. I’m sure you must have seen some horrible things.”

“Thank you,” Sam says. “But we’re actually here because there’s been an increase in unusual attacks in the area.”

“Have you noticed anything like that?” Dean asks.

“No. Nothing like that.”

“A few of the victims have joined your group, right?”

“Yeah, I guess,” Allen says. “It’s normal, though. It’s just word of mouth, people finding us. Do you think there’s something targeting us?”

“That’s what we’re hoping to find out,” Sam assures.

“Have you noticed anything that the local attacks have had in common?”

Allen pauses to give it some thought. “They happen at night. The people who got attacked, they didn’t see much. I don’t know as much as you about, you know…”

“Monsters?” Dean supplies.

“Yeah, monsters.” He seems uncomfortable with the term.

Sam throws him a line. “We were thinking it sounds like a vampire attack. They don’t normally let their victims go, though. Do you have contact information for any of the women who have been attacked? We’d like to talk to them, get their side of the story.”

“Yeah, sure, of course…” Allen pulls out his phone and starts scrolling through it.

“There were also two deaths,” Dean says. “Jason Huibregtse and Patricia Mueller. Did you know them?”

“Doesn’t ring a bell, sorry.”

* * *

They leave with a list of names and numbers of girls who’ve been attacked. Allen offers to let them know that Sam and Dean are investigating the attacks and provide a bit of introduction.

In the meantime, they need to look for potential vampire nest locations.

It is not fun.

That night Sam outlines the most likely area and starts compiling lists of empty or abandoned buildings. The benefit of looking for a vampire nest is that they can do it during the day. In fact, that’s the best time to do it, so Dean helps Sam search property records for foreclosures and the like.

Their motel—the Chateau Royale—seems to have taken inspiration from the French origins of the city. The room is white with gold trim and littered with fleur-de-lis. The overall effect is more Mardi Gras than French countryside, but Mardi Gras is exactly Dean’s style, so he’s not complaining.

Sam gets them up early the next morning. They grab breakfast burritos from a gas station and start combing the countryside for their vampires. The Impala is loud enough that they have to park a distance away and walk up to check on the buildings. And when they’re inevitably a bust, they also gotta walk back.

“I’m just saying, we could park an electric car a lot closer,” Sam says. He’s got that kid-brother smile, the one that says he knows exactly what he’s doing. “They’re quiet.”

It’s an old argument with them, worn smooth with time and repetition.

Dean rises to the bait anyway. Nothing better to do.

“You wanna try to outrun someone in some battery-powered toy car?”

“The Tesla Model S goes zero to 60 in two seconds,” Sam points out.

“Yeah and then we run out of juice in the middle of Nebraska.”

“There are supercharging stations all over, now. We could charge it up in the bunker. Imagine never having to pay for gas again.”

“Charlie’s credit card handles that, anyway.”

“No oil changes, either,” Sam adds.

Dean can feel his face pull into something like disgust. That may sound nice to Sam, who’s only ever done car maintenance because it was necessary. Dean isn’t like that, and Sam knows it. Dean likes the feel of the machinery in his hands, the oil under his nails. He could take the entire Impala apart and put it back together if he wanted to, and sometimes he does. It’s a good way to pass the time, a good way to keep himself occupied.

“We’d be fucked if we ever crashed,” Dean points out. He can buy parts for the Impala—Bobby used to keep an eye out for anything likely to need replacing, and Dean’s moved that stash to the bunker. “Elon Musk is a dick.”

Sam snorts. “You got me, there. There are other electric cars, though.”

“None that you’d fit in, Sasquatch.”

They’ve made it back to the car. Dean runs his hand along her roof, appreciating her strong lines. He catches Sam shaking his head at him out of the corner of his eye, but doesn’t bother justifying it with a response. He knows Sam appreciates the car. He’s always taken good care of her, in Dean’s absence.

They work through lunch and check out a few more places—a couple abandoned farmhouses, one warehouse on the outskirt of town—before heading back into town. Dean noticed a bar that looked promising. They don’t really need to hustle pool anymore, and Dean generally avoids doing so while they’re in the middle of a job, anyway. He’d be lying if he said he didn’t miss it a little.

He strikes up a friendly game of pool with some locals, low-stakes. Doesn’t want his skills getting rusty, after all. He lets them get a couple nice shots in before wiping the floor with them, but they take it well. He heads back to the table, and Sam, who’s staring at his phone.

“Who you texting?”

“Some of the women from the support group, Allen gave them my number. Really sounds like vamps.”

“Any of them wanna chat? I can stop over if they want.” Dean injects just enough sleeze into the line to make Sam roll his eyes.

“We might have to if we don’t have any luck finding the nest,” Sam says. “I think we should try and interview some of the family of the two people who died.”

“Yeah? Any leads on that?”

“Patricia Mueller’s got a granddaughter who lives in town. But I want to start with Jason’s girlfriend. I found a few posts from her on Aftermath’s Facebook page.”

“Was she part of the group?”

“Yeah. I found a few comment threads where she’s tagged like people were replying to her, but all her posts are gone. Deleted. I think she might have something to say.”

“Works for me,” Dean says.

Dean closes out their tab and they head back to the motel. The route takes them through town; not a long drive, but a slow one.

“You seeing this?” Sam asks when they’re about halfway there. He’s looking in the side-view mirror.

“Yeah,” Dean says, eyes on the rear-view.

They get back to the room and prepare, their actions routine. No communication needed between them beyond glances.

Dean shuts the lights off and they wait.

When the door slams open, Dean’s standing next to it with a syringe full of dead man’s blood. He gets ahold of vamp #1’s shoulders and swings him into the wall, unloading the syringe as he goes. Vamp #2 is through the door right after his buddy, not having realized that their ambush has failed. Sam takes his head off with a neat swing of his machete.

They’re tense as they wait, looking out the door.

“Only two?” Sam asks.

“I’m insulted,” Dean replies. He looks at vamp #1, who’s sitting against the wall of their room, glaring at him. His face is young, but on a vamp that can be deceiving. “Don’t you know who we are?”

“Hunters,” the vamp spits, defiant and unafraid.

Dean crouches down in front of him. “We’re the Winchesters.”

There. That was the face he was looking for.

* * *

The doorknob is going to need replacing. Sam wedges the door closed to hide it, for now.

They’ve got the vampire trussed up in one of the motel chairs. All the lights are on, so the vamp’s squinting as he glances nervously between them.

“This doesn’t have to be hard,” Dean starts. He shines one of their high-powered flashlights straight into the vamp’s face, making him flinch away. Dean remembers his brief time as a vampire, the way his eyes burned from anything brighter than a candle, worse than the worst hangover. “Just tell us where your buddies are.”

“Fuck you.”

Completely uninspired. Dean lowers the flashlight. “We don’t really need you to tell us. We’ll find the nest either way, you guys aren’t that smart.”

“What do you even care?” the vamp asks. “We’re not dropping bodies. We’re living off of blood-bags.”

“Tell that to all the people you’ve attacked.”

“You think my whole nest is surviving off of a few bites? C’mon.”

He’s got a point there. “Then why are you still going after them?”

“It’s not our idea,” the vamp grumbles.

Now that’s interesting. “Then whose idea is it?”

“None of your fucking business.”

Sam leans forward, speaking up for the first time. “Someone is pulling your strings, someone who is planning out your targets. Do you think they didn’t know who we are? No, come on, you know better.” Shock dawns over the vampire’s face and Sam digs the knife deeper. “They sent two of you up against the Winchesters. That’s not a plan, that’s a suicide mission.”

Dean watches as the vampire realizes he’s been sold out, as that betrayal morphs into anger.

Outplayed on both sides, the vamp starts talking. They get as much out of him as he can, but the only actionable information is the nest’s address. This guy’s just a grunt, cannon fodder.

Dean almost feels bad for him. He makes his death quick.

* * *

It’s risky to go after the nest at night, but waiting until dawn would give the vampires too much time to clear out. The address takes them to a farmhouse way out of town.

They see it a long ways off.

“Well, shit,” Dean says, pulling into the farmhouse’s driveway.

The entire structure is ablaze.

“They must have known we were coming,” Sam says.

“Son of a bitch,” Dean mutters as they watch the house burn. 

Even parked as they are a good distance away they can feel the heat of the conflagration through the windshield. The house is two stories, but Dean doesn’t think the second floor is long for this world. The fire’s already eating through the outer walls. By morning there’ll be nothing left but ashes.

Dean throws the car into reverse and gets back on the road. They don’t want to still be here when the fire department shows up.

“You think they fled?” Sam asks as they head back into town.

“Probably. If they’re surviving off blood bags they don’t need to stick around.”

“Maybe,” Sam says.

Dean can tell that Sam’s chewing on something in that big brain of his. Dean doesn’t like it either, hates it when the monsters get away.

They manage to get back to the motel and catch a few hours of shut-eye after wedging their broken door closed. Dean wakes up too early and runs out to grab some coffee for the both of them. When he gets back Sam’s up and on his laptop.

“You ready to head out?” Dean asks.

“Head out?”

“I mean, the bad guys fled. You can use your fancy program to keep an eye on the area, but that vamp last night wasn’t wrong. Without bodies we don’t have much to go on.”

“It doesn’t make sense. If they’ve got bagged blood, why attack anyone?”

“Tastes better?”

“I’ve got one person I want to interview, before we head out,” Sam says.

Dean remembers that Sam suggested talking to the family of the two earlier victims yesterday, before the attack. It might be a waste of time, but they’ve learned better than to second guess each other’s intuition.

There’s no apocalypse on the horizon. They’ve got all the time in the world.

“Sure, Sammy.”

* * *

Marnie, the girlfriend of the late Jason Huibregtse, is tiny. She’s got dark brown hair and mousey little features. She barely comes up to Sam’s armpit and her voice squeaks a little. She might seem a little too precious if she didn’t swear like a damn sailor.

“Fuck Allen.” She tosses a hunk of bread at the chickens in her backyard. “I wouldn’t trust that weaselly little fuck as far as I can throw him.”

Dean might love Marnie.

“When did you first join the group?” A benefit of interviewing people who already know about the supernatural is there’s no need for the monkey suits. They showed up in flannel and jeans, but once Marnie heard they were investigating Allen she opened right up.

“I lost my brother,” she says. “First to the drugs, then to a fucking monster. No one else gave a shit, you know? The group was where I met Jason.”

“Jason Huibregtse?”

“Yeah. When he was a kid the house his family moved into had a ghost. No one died or anything, but it freaked him out. He had nightmares. Ended up getting into a bunch of superstitious bullshit, but eventually he found that group. It was helping.”

“You were helping too, right?”

“Yeah, we met through the group. He was the sweetest guy I’ve ever known.”

“What happened with Allen?”

“He hit on me. Which is, whatever, I don’t give a shit. He’s not my type, I’m strictly into himbos, at least when it comes to men.”

Sam snorts. Marnie gives him an appraising look. Suddenly Dean misses the coverage of the fed suits.

“He hit on you,” Dean prompts. It must’ve come across as a little short, because Sam gives him a questioning look. Of course he didn’t notice. Wasn’t he just marveling at how smart Sam is? Strike that, Sam is a dumbass.

Luckily Marnie rolls with it. “He was a little weird with the girls. There were only a few of us in the beginning, and he hit on all of us. It’s not like I can judge, that’s how me and Jason met. I’m sure Allen seemed nice, so he got a lot of attention. I think that’s what he likes, the attention. When some of the new girls joined, he started hanging out with them outside of the group, having them over to his place. Other people from the group would come, too, it wasn’t like it was exclusive. But one of the girls, Melissa, told me that he got weird when she stopped.”

“That’d be Melissa Mueller?”

“Yeah, and then her grandmother died.”

And that’s where Dean knows the name—Patricia Mueller was the other murder victim. “Animal attack.”

Marnie’s still talking. “Melissa didn’t handle it well, especially so soon after she’d been attacked. And Allen kind of just… swooped in. I dunno, she stopped returning my texts. I told Jason about it and he confronted Allen.”

“What happened with that?” Sam asks.

She shrugs. She’s run out of bread and so they watch as the chickens continue strutting around her backyard. They need the exercise, apparently. Dean’s only interest in chickens is their wings and legs, preferably smothered in barbeque sauce, but these seem more like pets than food. They’re named after Spice Girls, but with only four there’s no Posh. Ginger, Marnie told them fondly, is almost too stupid to live.

“Allen gave a bunch of excuses,” she says. “And then two days later Jason was dead. ‘A robbery,’ the cops said. Robbery my ass. That’s not a fucking coincidence.”

“You think Allen had something to do with Jason’s death.”

“Yeah.”

“Why haven’t you left?” Dean asks. “You’re not worried you’ll be next?”

Her chin juts out, stubbornly. “I moved here for Aftermath. I was a city girl, and I moved to this place that’s like 50 miles from the nearest synagogue, but I like it here. I’m not gonna let some asshole run me out of town.”

Yeah, he definitely loves Marnie.

* * *

They go to Allen’s house.

They don’t have all the answers yet, but they’re pretty sure they can get it out of him. Because something is definitely going on, there are too many coincidences here. The vampire attack on their motel room the day after they talked to Allen, the way the deaths connect to people from Aftermath.

Dean feels vindicated in hating the squirrely asshole from the beginning.

He doesn’t answer the door when they ring the high-tech camera-equipped doorbell, but his Tesla is in the driveway. They wait a few minutes before heading back to the car. Dean drives around the corner of the block, far enough away that they’re out of camera range, and they head back on foot through the backyard.

Dean keeps an eye out as Sam picks the lock on the back door and then they’re in, guns drawn.

The ground floor is empty, but on a hunch Dean directs them to the basement. A lot of houses this far south don’t even have a basement. As soon as Dean hits the stairs down, he knows that he’s right—he can hear the loud clack of a computer keyboard.

Allen is working at a massive computer set-up, his back to them. It’s got three screens and what looks like a small server rack. Sam will know. The basement is unfinished other than some hastily-added insulation. An odd choice for a home office. 

“Nice set up,” Dean says, gun trained on Allen’s narrow back.

Allen screams and jumps in his chair, whirling around to the face them. When he sees the guns trained on him his hands go up automatically. “Jesus Christ, what the fuck?”

“You didn’t answer your door,” Dean says, relaxing a bit now that he can see Allen’s unarmed. He lowers the gun, but doesn’t put it away.

“Didn’t hear the bell,” Allen replies, grinning nervously. “Do you need something?”

“Just some things that aren’t adding up,” Dean says. “We got attacked last night. Vamps.”

It’s hard to tell if Allen’s look of surprise at that is genuine.

“We took care of it,” Dean continues. “But then when we went to hit the nest… it’d gone up in flames. Nothing left.”

“So they’re gone?” Allen’s relief seems genuine, but personal.

“Seems like it,” Dean says. “Almost as if they got a heads up from someone.”

“Is that Tor?” Sam asks, nodding at one of the computer screens. It’s open to the internet. Dean can’t read the words on the screen from here, it’s just text and links on a white background. “Using a dark web browser, probably running it through a VPN. And then you keep the whole set-up in the basement. What are you up to?”

Allen’s face crumples, he hunches in on himself. “Please don’t kill me.”

The story comes out in bits and pieces. Allen doesn’t know who approached him, found him after an Aftermath meeting. He only knows they weren’t human, and that they had work for him. 

It takes a lot of programming to create a black-market auction system for human body parts.

Dean remembers that case vividly, the panic as he realized the actual FBI agent working the case was working with the monsters—and that he had Sam.

He remembers entering an abattoir, Sam strapped down on a table, gun to his head. In a life full of close calls, that’s one of the closest.

Dean made jokes in the aftermath of that case, quips about everyone wanting a piece of Sam, and Sam was nice enough—or shaken enough—not to call him on how weak they were. It’s bothered him since then, as he’s aware it bothers Sam, knowing that the monsters who were bidding were still out there. The implication that there were more of them than they could ever take down.

And now it seems their creepy werewolf friend from Sioux Falls is connected to it all, along with this asshole.

 _We are many_ indeed.

Dean’s got that sinking feeling in his gut, the one he gets when he’s looking at the entrance of a rabbit hole and wondering how far down it goes.

Allen gives them everything he knows, but it’s clear he’s being kept on a need-to-know basis. It’s not just the human organ auction, there’s a host of websites spreading out through the dark web. Allen helps where he’s needed, with whatever they give him. He’s strictly on the IT side of things, has nothing to do with the actual kidnapping and dismemberment.

They pay him well for his services, in untraceable cryptocurrency. But whoever is running the show doesn’t trust him.

The vampires were here to keep an eye on him.

“Doesn’t explain all the attacks,” Dean says. If the vamps have a steady supply of blood from elsewhere, why risk attracting attention from hunters? “How does Aftermath tie into this?”

“It doesn’t!” Allen insists. “They’re forcing me to do this,” he gestures at the computer set up behind him. “But I really believe in Aftermath. It’s important. I was so lost before I found it, and then when I got this group started here, in person? Meeting all these other people? Aftermath is doing good work.”

He’s too earnest to be lying. Dean thinks back to the group, the way it seemed almost like an AA meeting with the coffee and circle of chairs. Easy to see where Allen got the idea. But grief and trauma aren’t exactly like addiction.

“But then people moved on,” Dean says. He can tell from the set of Allen’s mouth that he’s right. “That’s it, isn’t it? People started moving on. People stopped coming. I’m sure not everyone on the Facebook group wants to pack it up and move to southern Indiana. After all your work, after catching the attention of monsters, it was all going to be for nothing.”

“So you ginned up some new recruits,” Sam says.

“And I’m sure it was just a happy coincidence that they were all young and pretty,” Dean says. Guy was a computer nerd who found himself with a group of fawning, traumatized women. “Yeah, you’re helping a lot. You helped Patricia Mueller.”

“That was an accident,” Allen says, voice fallen to just above a whisper. “It was just supposed to be a scare.”

“But she was old. Probably more fragile than the vamps expected,” Sam says.

“And Jason Huibregtse?” Dean asks. “Was that an accident?”

“I didn’t want him dead.”

They can fill in the rest. Jason started asking questions, and Allen panicked, told the vamps to scare him off. Except they weren’t as squeamish about murder.

Now they’ve got a conundrum. Allen, for all his sins, hasn’t killed anyone. He’s not innocent, and if it were up to Dean maybe he’d just put a round in his forehead and call it a day. 

But he’s also a victim, pushed in some ways by whichever monster forced him into the orbit of this dark web group.

And he’s human.

Honestly, Dean isn’t going to lose sleep if the world loses one more creep. But Sam might. Cases like this, cases where the perp is just some dumb person, those always hit Sam the worst. His tender-hearted baby bro, who thinks even monsters deserve redemption.

They exchange a look, and Dean gives a shrug. Sam jerks his head toward the staircase and they put enough distance between them that Allen won’t be listening in, but where they can still keep an eye on the guy.

“What do you think?” Sam asks.

“You know I don’t like the guy,” Dean says.

“That doesn’t mean you wanna put a bullet in him.”

“Do you?” Dean asks, because it’s a little weird. Usually Sam would be making his case about the sanctity of human life or whatever.

“They strapped me down and sold me for parts.” Sam’s voice is perfectly even, but Dean is an expert in all things Sam. He can see the fissures.

“So let’s gank him,” Dean says.

Sam’s mouth presses into a thin line, and Dean waits.

“We tell him to stop,” Sam says.

“You wanna do the honors?”

They return to where Allen has been sitting a chastised schoolkid, hands on his knees.

“You got an external harddrive somewhere?” Sam asks.

Allen nods fervently.

“You’re going to give me everything you have,” Sam says. “And then you’re going to take it all down.”

“Take it down?” Allen asks.

“All of it,” Dean says. “We’ll be checking.”

“We have a friend,” Sam says. “She can help you disappear. I’ll have her contact you.”

Allen nods.

“You’re getting a second chance,” Sam says. “Don’t fuck it up.”

“We’ll be watching,” Dean adds. 

Allen pales, and Dean’s gotta hope that it means he understands how lucky he is.

They walk out of there with a few terabytes of data, the first piece in a new puzzle. Allen promises to wipe the servers as soon as he can. It might not stop the monsters running the damn thing, but it’ll slow them up. They’ll get Charlie to set him up somewhere safe. 

Dean’s ready to head out of town, but Sam convinces him to make one final stop.

They meet for dinner back at Maisie’s, the restaurant. It’s the middle of the week, but Michelle leaves work early and makes the drive down special. Marnie comes, too. They know each other from Aftermath, but never got a chance to connect beyond that.

Sam and Dean explain what they found. Some details they leave vague, but they make it clear that Allen was working with monsters. That it shouldn’t be a problem anymore, that he won’t be a problem anymore, but that they should be wary.

“I fucking knew he was a creep,” Marnie pronounces.

Michelle is much more shocked by the revelation. Dean gets the feeling that she had a bit of a crush on Allen. She doesn’t have great taste in men.

By the time dinner is over Marnie has decided that she’ll start attending the Aftermath meetings again. But she also has some ideas for expanding the online version of it, with Michelle’s help. She’s already convinced Michelle to come over and talk through some ideas, meet her chickens.

Dean would think that was a come-on if he hadn’t seen the chickens himself.

Though considering Marnie’s got the same appraising look in her eyes as when she was checking out Sam, it might be that as well.

Sam leaves them both their contact information. He also gives them Donna’s number, as she’s the closest of their friends. Garth might be closer, but the man has a family.

The road out of Vincennes cuts west through the bottom of Illinois, stick-straight and flatter than a pancake. The asphalt is smooth under the Impala’s tires as she takes them home.

* * *

Sam’s phone rings only a week later. Dean doesn’t hear the call; Sam’s looking through the files from Allen’s computer and Dean’s fiddling with their janky washing machine. Sam finds him with parts spread out over the laundry room floor, Miracle tagging along at his heels.

“Michelle called,” Sam announces. “Some hiker found Allen’s body on the edge of town. Animal attack.”

“Tying up loose ends,” Dean translates.

Sam nods, already having come to the same conclusion. “We need to know more.”

**Author's Note:**

>  _Next time on Supernatural... it's Vegas Week!_  
> 
> 
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